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I am not a Hindu or a religious scholar, but I could see how making use of the products of a naturally-deceased cow might be okay to use for purposes other than eating. Part of the argument for the revered status of cows in Hindu religious life is their generosity: they provide dung for fertilizer, milk for food and strength for labor (plowing, transport, etc.). Furthermore, depending on who you ask, the sacredness of a cow ends with its death. It's just a body afterwards. Again, this depends upon the philosophy and opinion of the individual.

Sorry if this question is ignorant (but hey aren't all questions?) but can you explain the nature of the sacredness of the cow? I have never really understood if it was sacred because of the things it provides, like milk and strength, or for the peacefulness a cow represents. Does it have anything to do with a deity or the reincarnation cycle?

(posted this above, but I like to use the shotgun style of questioning, fire a lot, hit sometimes.)

I've always thought it was a misconception that people think they are sacred, it is more of a respect for the animal.
I believe that it comes out of the idea that a cow gives you lots of Milk and with that milk you can make so much food so killing a cow would be seen as a waste, and during times when the monsoon wouldn't produce the crops the families would rely on the cows and it became a very "loving" relationship.

The way I like to best explain it to outsiders is by comparing it to a Dog in the US. Here people don't eat dog because they've helped them scout and hunt in the past and become kind of a companion as is the cow in India but in a place like Vietnam they eat dog. It's all just the view of the culture.

(There's no way a question like this can be ignorant especially if you're just curious, it's great to study and learn about other cultures. Brings us all closer and makes the world seem like a much more homey place)

Hinduism is an umbrella religion, but it is rooted in Vedanta, which is a system of philosophy ultimately not concerned with the idea of a deity separate from human experience (in the advaita, non duelist school).

While there are tribal religions under the umbrella of Hinduism, particularly South Indian ones, that are explicitly polytheistic, traditional Hinduism is monist, or pantheism/panentheism.

Most of the animal companions, or animal mounts, or animal bodies that are depicted as being part of a deity:

Fall outside the Vedic pantheon of gods, and are developments in the religion as the IE speakers moved farther into the subcontinent, featuring syncretic development with local religions.

Tend to be mostly allegory, especially by the time you get to the Puranic period, which is marked by heavy metaphor and religious commentary as the mode of religious discourse and instruction, instead of good ol' fire worship rite, ritual and chant.

The cow was inherently the source of all income in an agrarian society like India. Used to plough lands, milk as a source of nutrition, dung used as fuel and building material. So everything from a cow was of use to man. Cows were known as "Kamadhenu" or giver of all desires/needs. Hence the value/holiness of the cow. This is a bit simple but I writing off of my phone here.

This professor argues that beef eating was common in ancient India till after the rise of Buddhism. Priests began to denounce it after rise of Buddhism. I haven't read up on it completly but it doesn't surprise me at all. Modern Hinduism far removed from the philosophical approach of it's original forms and much more ritualized and extreme.

Sorry if this question is ignorant (but hey aren't all questions?) but can you explain the nature of the sacredness of the cow? I have never really understood if it was sacred because of the things it provides, like milk and strength, or for the peacefulness a cow represents. Does it have anything to do with a deity or the reincarnation cycle?

A lot of Hindus might disagree with me, but m a liberal Hindu and after a lot of research I was amazed to find out the facts about religiousness of COW

Manu, our equivalent of Adam, the first guy ever defined some laws called Manusmriti, in which it says, its ok to eat cattle, deer and a few other animals (source), but absenteism should be preferred.

also, in the ancient Hindu scriptures (vedas) its mentioned that cow is goddess and is referred to as Devi (which means goddess)

But still animal sacrifice has always been a part of early hindu kings and in religious books like Mahabharata , Rantideva distributed beef to brahmins (who are the religious sects and perform spiritual prayers).

As a political tool, some people have tried to blame it on the Mughal empire and the muslims that they brought it to India, which is completely wrong.

Also, what is noticeable is that, somewhere along the line of Jainism and Buddhism emergence, the sacredness of cow became popular. Also, one of our Gods (Krishna) was a cattle herder and he loved his animals, so he started preaching animal love.

Since We were the pioneers of surgery, a guy call charak described cow's meet as medicine as well.

I might like to add one thing here, according to scriptures, the kings always distributed Cows to Brahmins as it is one of the most valuable animal and later on , killing a cow was equivalent to killing a brahnmin, but some instances can be found where the said word is beef, but when translated, since it was difficult to believe that beef could be distributed, it was replaced by cow as a whole.

but in the present time, ITS BELIEVED that cow is sacred and its in OUR RELIGION to not eat it.
so everyone defines his own religion and hinduism is so vast that you can opt for following Manu and eat animals, or follow Rama or Krishna and not eat animals at all.

As I understand it, Hinduism doesn't explicitly forbid the eating of meat, but rather the teaching is along the lines of "you are what you eat" - different properties are ascribed to different foods, but meat overall is associated with impulsiveness, anger and a predisposition to 'baser' actions such as carnal focus.

Since one of the driving principles of Hinduism is attaining nirvana through meditation, karma and detachment from worldly things, it is implied that eating meat makes it difficult to do so.

In early agricultural India, the cow supplied a lot of variety in food. Milk from a cow could be used in multiple ways in cooking or used to make buttermilk, cottage cheese, or yoghurt, all of which are still extremely common in Indian cuisine in pretty much all parts of India.

So it's very valuable, basically, and once popular religion took the region by storm, important things evolvde into sacred things.

Cows are 'sacred' in the sense that they happen to be the agriculturally relevant animal that Indians used in religious allegory as embodying motherhood and plenty, etc all that good stuff.

It's likely that this bovine died of natural causes and wasn't killed for the purpose of carving stuff into it's skull; but you're right, that's Ganesha up top there.

To me, those look like water buffalo horns.

This is probably an artists rendering of something called a 'kapala' which is tradtionally a human skull carved to look all fancy and shit used as a ritual bowl for offering sweets/water to images of deities.
These never actually came from human sacrifice; that's a bit of propaganda medieval Hindu powers used to scorn Buddhists who also make use of the kapala.

In Indian religions (a lot of whose adherents in practice don't really get a lot of liturgical education, so it happens across them all) a kapala would be used in ritual offerings to an image of a deity in a symbolic throwback to a verse in the Rg Veda, wherein "Yama"

btw, if any of you are adherents of old Norse religion...somehow...I guess you're gonna recognize this as a the story of Ymir...

one of the first born mortals "surrenders" his body into making of the Earth, in a pretty classical Indo-European creation story.

About Ganesha, one of the explanations as to why he has an elephant head goes like this:

Ganesha is the son of Shiva (one of the three major gods in Hindu, god of destruction/recreation) and his wife Parvati. After they conceived, Shiva went on a long hunting trip, and was unaware he had a son.

One day Parvati wanted to take a bath, and so she asked Ganesha to guard the entrance for her. When Shiva (a stranger to Ganesha) had returned, he demanded entrance to the bathing area but Ganesha refused. Furious from being kept from his own wife after such a long trip, Shiva unsheathed his sword and cut off his own son's head.

Parvati was understandably upset by this, and so to appease her, Shiva did the only thing he could with the resources around him: he replaced the head with that of an elephant, thus saving his son's life.

Here is another good Ganesh and family story (from memory so may not be accurate, but thats how stories were passed down back in the day anyway right?):

Shiva and Parvati had been given a fruit by the gods and both the sons Ganesh and Murugan wanted some. Neither knowing which one was the eldest set out to win the fruit by having a race around the world three times. Murugan set off right away on his trip around the world riding on his peacock, while ganesh waited patiently by his parents. Murigan would only stop to pray at the holy places around the world, while ganesh was still waiting at the starting line.

As Murigan was rounding his third trip around and getting close to the finish line, ganesh gets up and walks around his parents 3 times. To him, his parents were the world, murugan accepted this as truth and conceded race to ganesh.

That's more or less it, but it bears mentioning that this is likely a tale coming out of the syncretism between the Gangetic plains religion and native South Indian beliefs because of the presence of Murugun, predominately a Tamilian deity, associated very closely with the Indus Valley civilization.

Murugan is just the south indian name of Kartikeya or Skanda or Kumara Swamy, im from kerela, but i assume the story is the same no matter what part youre from just the name of the gods change slightly.

Kartikeya is connected to the Vedic 'Agni', but Murugan comes with a lot of history that simply wasn't in the Vedas, and is unique to the southern Indian states.

This doesn't make South Indian additions to the Vedic religion any less philosophically valid, since it's entirely possible (and some would say likely) that they were part of the same tradition that became Vedanta, from what was simply just another Indo-European religion before.

In a disputable etymology, W. Meid (1992) has linked the names Yama (reconstructed in Proto-Indo-European as *yemos) and the name of the primeval Norse frost giant Ymir, which can be reconstructed in Proto-Germanic as *umijaz or *jumijaz, in the latter case possibly deriving from PIE *ym̥yos, from the root yem "twin". In his myth, however, Ymir is not a twin, and only shares with Yama the characteristics of being primeval and mortal. However, Ymir is a hermaphrodite and engenders the race of giants.
-wiki

i doubt that it's related to Ymir. dont get me wrong i love when cognates like this pop up (patra and Piter) but this seems a bit of a stretch.

Ahh, but just as other members of the pantheon (particularly the "horse twins" in IE religion) tend to have analogs, both Yama/Tvastr seem to be correlated in the deified kingship relations that existed between Ymir and Tuisto!

In fact, in Germania by good ol' Tacitus, there is even mention of Tuisto being the father of Mannus (from which "man" and "men" come into our own language today).

Such an arrangement is identically found with Yama being the sire of Manu, the first man!

They're typically 'agentive' words, and kinship terms are thus one of the more notable classes; like a "brother" is a role in the same way a "Doctor" is.

Because Sanskrit is heavily case declined, typically, those endings get modified in grammar, something that gets lost both in its descendant languages and in the modern descendants of its sister languages.

However, you can see the great deal of parallelism with kinship terms:

Brother, Sister, Mother, Father (English)

Braatr, Svastr, Maatr, Pitr (Sanskrit) (Bit of cheating though; this isn't in devanagiri, but in the Roman script)

Cows are not one of our Gods. And it makes no sense that a bovine skull (or any other skull for that matter) would be used to carve Hindu Gods. My only guess at an explanation is that the artist wasn't Hindu.

I think what he was trying to achieve with this, though, was "honoring" this bull by portraying a god in the carving. Much like how ancient Egyptians revered cats, and so decorated tombs and sarcophagi with images of cats.

Yes! I know the answer to this! This is really common in Bali. I went there just after I got married and they have a lot of these carved into Cows heads. It's weird because they're Hindu but it's just something that they do quite commonly over there
Link

I'm Hindu and I can assure you this is not 'offensive' to Hindu culture as a whole. Some of the way liberal Hindus would find this cool/hip in an ironic sense (hey, we have youngsters too.) And granted, my parents would recoil and make me throw this out if I brought it home (they're not fans of having animal skulls in the house.) However, this myth that cows are so sacred that carving something out of a cow skull would offend us.. it is just a myth.. we treat cows as equals but we don't pray to the heavens above and repent if we see a carving in a cow skull..

I believe Ganesh is Lord of Fortune and not of Knowledge as the text states. Thats why you will see a lot of Ganesh's image with businesspeople (in their stores), because they hope to make a lot of money ...hehe. The God of wisdom is the female god Saraswati.
Just to be clear: these are not actual gods as persons, but different aspects of one supreme power personified. Some energies are male, some female, some destructive (Shiva), or creating etc. Hinduism is monotheistic.

Went on here to post this. The hardness of skull/bone is so much more than wood, it seems like using a chisel would be nearly impossible. I assume using a dremel would be possible but wondering if there are other methods.

Hindu here, born, raised, and practicing. I'm not an extremist by any means nor am I liberal, just the average Hindu. It's not bad taste, but I don't find it appealing either. Most families nowadays are lenient one way or another with their religion.. so displaying this wouldn't be akin to committing a crime. I know of a few people who would display this piece in their houses without a second thought but it just all comes down to personal preference.

aaahh as I guessed, Bangalore and Chennai are southern, so i expected that.
I know there are some places in Delhi selling, but only in muslim dominant areas.
havent eaten it there though...
had no idea about Mumbai, good to know... thanks :)

U guys are right it is a Indian carving but not designed or carved in India for us the cow is a holy animal and the elephant in the middle is god ganesh who is god of knowledge. It very Indian but I a sure u its not Indian cuz we find cow holy and that is why we don't eat meat

Beautiful piece, though it reminds me of a fellow class mate who based his project on carving knife handles out of bone using a dremel. Our studio smelled like burnt ass hairs and decay for weeks. I'm retching just remembering it.